In a continuing effort to improve the quality of shipping fruits, I, the inventor, typically hybridize a large number of peach, nectarine, plum, apricot, and cherry seedlings each year. I also grow a lesser number of open pollinated seeds of each of these fruits. The present invention relates to a new and distinct variety of interspecific tree, which has been denominated varietally as ‘Apriplum VII’.
During a typical blooming season I isolate as seed parents both individual and groups of different plum trees by covering them with screen houses. A hive of bees is placed inside each such house, and bouquets to provide pollen from different plum, apricot, and interspecific plum-apricot hybrid trees are placed in buckets near the trees approximately every two days for the duration of the bloom. During 2000 one such house containing an unpatented interspecific tree that produced fruit with purple skin and orange flesh, code named 7P1017, was crossed by me in this manner. To pollinate this tree, I selected bouquets from several sources of apricot, plum, and interspecific plum-apricot hybrid trees without keeping specific written details. Upon reaching maturity the fruit from this tree was harvested and the seeds were removed, cracked, stratified and germinated as a group with the label “H19 7P1017”. They were grown as seedlings on their own root in my greenhouse and upon reaching dormancy transplanted to a cultivated area of my experimental orchard lcoated near Le Grand, Calif. in Merced County (San Joaquin Valley). During the summer of 2004 the claimed variety was selected by me as a single plant from the group of seedlings described above. Subsequent to origination of the present variety of interspecific tree, I asexually reproduced it by budding and grafting in the experimental orchard described above, and such reproduction of plant and fruit characteristics were true to the original plant in all respects. The reproduction of the variety included the use of ‘Nemaguard’ (unpatented) rootstock upon which the present variety was compatible and true to type.
The present variety is similar to ‘Plumsweettwo’ (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 14,196) plum by being self-unfruitful and by producing fruit that is clingstone in type, nearly black in skin color, red to orange in flesh color, and is excellent in flavor, but is distinguished therefrom by producing fruit that is somewhat smaller in size, that is heart shaped instead of globose, that has a less distinguishable suture, that has less pronounced skin freckling, that matures about twenty-five days later, and that has a strong presence of apricot in flavor.